Penguin Classics: Selected Poems: Baudelaire

The poems of Charles Baudelaire, collected as Les Fleurs du Mal, are filled with unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity subjects dismissed as unpoetic by French literary conventions of the time. ‘Tableaux parisiens’ describes the poor, the criminal and the forgotten of the modern city – thieves, poets, drunkards, flaunting prostitutes and faded old ladies – yet manages to find beauty in the anonymous settings of their lives. The love poems of ‘Spleen et Ideal’ combine flights of lyricism and languorous eroticism with sudden, strikingly prosaic detail. Baudelaire’s prose poems, to which he gave the title Le Spleen de Paris, contain everything from topical, aggressively political humour to evocations of the rapture inspired by opium.

This edition presents the poems in French with English prose translations, and includes an introduction, suggestions for further reading, a glossary and an index of titles and first lines.